Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins was born on March 26, 1941, in Nairobi, Kenya, to British parents; his father, an agricultural officer, served in World War II, leading the family to return to England around 1949 after time in East Africa. He attended Oxford University, graduating in zoology in 1962 and earning a DPhil in 1966 under ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel laureate whose work on animal behavior influenced Dawkins' early research on instincts and genetics. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dawkins shifted focus to gene-level evolution, proposing that genes act as 'replicators' using organisms as 'survival machines.' His 1976 book The Selfish Gene revolutionized public understanding of Darwinism by emphasizing gene competition over organism-level selection, introducing memes as cultural replicators, and sparking debates on altruism via ideas from W.D. Hamilton and Robert Trivers. He held academic positions, including the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford from 1995 to 2008, and continued developing concepts like the 'extended phenotype' in his 1982 book, extending genetic influence to environments, artifacts, and social groups. Later in his career, Dawkins became a vocal proponent of atheism and secularism, authoring The God Delusion (2006) and engaging in public debates against creationism. He explored evolution's aesthetics in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), and traced human ancestry in The Ancestor's Tale (2004). Now an emeritus fellow at New College, Oxford, he remains active in science communication.